In numerous situations, a business must supply it's employees with cash for handling day-to-day operations. Usually the money is kept in a cashier's drawer conveniently placed for the employee's use but frequently in a place highly visible to the customer. Therefore in all of these businesses, a common concern is robbery. At any time a robber may approach the employee and present a gun and a note, or oral instructions, demanding that the employee hand over all of the cash in the employee's possession. The employee usually has ready access only to the cash in the employee's drawer which limits the amount of money stolen. But in most situations, even with the installation of video cameras recording the event, no one else may be aware of the fact that the employee is being robbed so that help can be dispatched as soon as possible.
Several solutions have been tried to address this problem. One solution was to provide a `panic` button close to the employee so that it may be activated by the employee when approached by a suspected robber. This solution, however, requires the employee's active participation at a time when the employee may be frightened and disoriented and thus likely to forget even a well rehearsed procedure. The employee may even be completely incapacitated before activating the alarm. Or, more commonly, the robber may insist that the employee back away from the money tray, place their hands on the counter top, then carefully pull the cash out of the drawer while the robber watches to make sure that the employee does not activate the panic button with their knee or hand.
The current state of the art attempts to correct these problems by providing the cashier's drawer with an alarm that will activate automatically when the employee, or anyone else, removes money from an inconspicuous money clip inside the drawer and hands it over to the robber. It provides for a tray assembly which sits on top of a false bottom to the enclosing drawer housing. The tray assembly includes two bill/coin trays which sit inside a drawer tray. A money clip lying inside one of the bill/coin trays incorporates a switch, i.e. a standard mechanical switch, and is connected at one end to a cable terminating in a connector which connects to a plug or jack mounted somewhere inside the drawer housing (usually by the alarm company). The plug or jack is in turn connected to a closed loop panic alarm so that when money contained in the money clip is removed, a remote alarm system is automatically and immediately activated. One particular cashier's drawer uses an RJ-7 modular telephone connector and an RJ-7 modular telephone jack.
Although the current art is an improvement over the panic alarm button, several other problems still persist. The first problem is in removing the tray assembly. Although the bill/coin trays actually contain the money, the bill/coin trays and drawer tray are usually removed together as one unit, the tray assembly. When the employee needs to remove the tray assembly, i.e. to go on break, the employee must first disconnect the money clip from the RJ-7 modular telephone jack. To do this, however, the employee must pull the sometimes heavy tray assembly almost completely from the drawer opening and balance it with one hand while disconnecting the money clip with the other. Furthermore, removing the tray assembly, even for a brief period of time, also activates the remote alarm system. The employee must call security (or an alarm monitoring company) either before the tray assembly is removed or after the alarm has been activated to prevent or cancel any help dispatched because of the false alarm.
Maintenance is a second problem with the money drawer assembly of the prior art. If the employee forgets and attempts to remove the tray assembly without first disconnecting the money clip, the RJ-7 telephone connector and jack are ripped apart, the connector is destroyed and must be replaced. Also, when the tray assembly is removed it is usually placed in a pigeon-hole slot in a vault. When placing the tray assembly into this slot, there is the possibility of the wires or connectors becoming cut or entangled in the process, requiring additional maintenance. Even if the employee remembers to disconnect the money clip before removing the tray assembly, the connector must be replaced periodically to ensure a tight connection with the jack because of the wear upon the RJ-7 telephone connector caused by the frequent connections to and disconnections from the telephone jack.
A third problem with the prior art is the loss of bills and/or coins between the bill/coin trays and the drawer tray. Two bill/coin trays sit inside the drawer tray. But, because the two bill/coin trays do not use all of the space provided in the drawer tray, there are gaps left between the sides of the trays into which bills and coins sometime fall. The employee may not even be aware of the loss until the end of the day when their money count is out of balance. The employee must then dismantle the tray assembly to retrieve the lost money.
In light of these considerations, it is a primary objective of the present invention to provide an improved cashier's drawer which does not suffer from the problems mentioned above with respect to the prior art.